The Invention of the Integrated Circuit : Jean Hoerni’s Patent Notebook
This week marks 65 years since Jean Hoerni applied for a patent for his ‘planar process’ a key step towards the creation of the modern monolithic integrated circuit. Babbage in The Chip Letter documents this landmark.
The integrated circuit was invented twice. First, by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments in September 1958, and then independently, a few months later, by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor. Noyce’s monolithic version formed the basis for future development and commercialization of the integrated circuit.
A crucial earlier step in the creation of the monolithic integrated circuit was the development of the ‘planar process’ for manufacturing transistors by Jean Hoerni, a physicist colleague of Noyce’s at Fairchild. After traveling to the U.S., he worked at Shockley Semiconductor before joining Noyce and Gordon Moore as one of the ‘traitorous eight’ engineers who left Shockley to found Fairchild Semiconductor.
At Fairchild, like other researchers, Hoerni kept ‘patent notebooks’ in which he methodically recorded his experiments and results, for use in subsequent patent applications. Hoerni was sketching his ideas for the ‘planar process’ which would create transistors embedded into the ‘plain’ of the chip.
Read more and see notebook entries and patent drawings in the post here.
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